


Basking

by bomberqueen17



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Demisexuality, Developing Relationship, Genderfluid Character, Other, Vaginal Sex, fluff and porn, i'm not sure, neither of them has a gender, or maybe they each have all of them
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-21
Updated: 2019-07-21
Packaged: 2020-07-09 07:28:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 14,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19883884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bomberqueen17/pseuds/bomberqueen17
Summary: Crowley is extremely confused about how or whether celestial beings can experience physical sexual desire. He's also not fantastic at using his words. Things go all... snake-shaped.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I was going to make this have footnotes, in the Proper Pratchett Style, but then I decided that I hate the fucking things so I won't. I'd already written all the footnotes as parenthetical asides, and I realized I could just... stop there.  
> 

Crowley perched moodily on an overpass, his huge wings half-mantled for balance. He wasn’t sulking, he wasn’t lurking, he was brooding, and that was different. Well, he wasn’t brooding like a bird did, there were no eggs, it was more that he was brooding like a teenager, but that wasn’t much more complimentary to imagine actually, so he left off brooding and slid sideways into sulking, which had probably been inevitable anyway. 

He wasn’t… upset… at anyone, but. Well, he had a lot to sort out, and it wasn’t going well.

It wasn’t that things weren’t going well. The reprieve from the terrors of Hell was going just swimmingly. He was free now to live the sort of life that any celestial being too long-accustomed to human ways would want to, if left in perfect freedom, and that was… proving somewhat hard to define.

He hadn’t really understood how reliant he was on the dynamic he and Aziraphale had set up, where he offered things and Aziraphale turned them down, and it was an unceasing agonizing pain on the edge of pleasure, that constant tantalizing torture of what-if, and so on.

Nowadays, everything he offered, Aziraphale generally happily accepted, or accepted with only minor quibbles, and it ought to have been paradise. Well, it _had_ been Paradise, more or less, at first. 

But the problem with being a celestial being was that one had all this brainpower going spare, and also this enormous weight of history, and six thousand years’ habit-- with of course a near-eternal stretch beforehand, before Time began-- of being a tortured demonic soul craving mercy had rather worn some grooves into his psyche. He couldn’t just-- accept that things were all right, and that they’d probably continue to work out, and that he should just trust to things to continue to go well. 

(He was as always perfectly aware that things turning out perfectly well were not in any way affected by how hard he worked for them, but that didn’t mean he could stop working either.)

It was quite a fantastic sulk he’d worked himself up into, trying to work out precisely what it was that was likely to come crashing down into disaster next. It was all focused around one single conversation, but with backup support built on innumerable other factors. 

“Well,” Aziraphale had said cheerily, giving Crowley one of those sidelong up-and-down looks that had always made him feel so funny right in the middle of what in this form was his chest, “it turns out, I’m an expert at _all kinds_ of love.” 

There’d been that curious emphasis, see, on both _all_ and _kinds_ , and it was giving Crowley a great deal of agitation to puzzle over what, precisely, the angel had meant. All… kinds… of love. He couldn’t mean… could he?

In order to swap bodies before their respective reckonings with their former employers, they’d had to mingle their essences in a way that was generally what those of angelic stock understood to be making love. And it had been wonderful; among the most profound experiences of Crowley’s life. They… understood one another, without impediment of membrane, joint, or limb, yadda yadda (Crowley wasn't sure who had given Milton that information, as it absolutely had not been him and Aziraphale had been cagey about it, but it was reasonably accurate, it turned out) -- it was really fantastic, really profound, really mind-blowing. And Crowley had been looking forward to maybe doing that again, without ulterior motive; it wasn’t the sort of thing celestial beings got up to very much, but it was perfectly respectable, and something he’d personally not done since, well, he didn’t know if he’d ever done it before the Fall, but. At any rate, it had been marvelous and rare and-- well, clearly wasn’t entirely what Aziraphale was referring to, when he said _all kinds_ of love. It _certainly_ was nothing like corporeal sex.

They’d been discussing, in a roundabout way, a bit of… the nature of their relationship, perhaps. Mostly reveling, indirectly and delicately, in the understanding that there was no longer any reason to pretend not to know one another, and what that really meant. They’d been easing their way into that, coming to understand what it meant to no longer have to pretend not to know one another, pretend not to enjoy one another’s company. It had been lovely; Aziraphale had never really spent any time in Crowley’s flat before, had only ever stopped by briefly, but now he could sit on the couch and goggle at the sculptures and make sweet noises at the plants.

(Crowley was mildly insulted that the plants were even lusher for Aziraphale, and very badly did not want to let on what funny things it did in his innerward corporeal parts when Aziraphale spoke in praise to them. It was-- odd-- the way he felt strangely almost-angry when the angel told the houseplants they were beautiful, and it tipped over into real anger when they got even lusher for it, and he had begun to realize there was a lot more going on in that than some plants and he was most eager not to investigate it.)

It was actually because of the plants that he wasn’t doing his sulking safely in his flat, but was rather getting lightly spat on by the rain and causing a lot of unnerving rumors among the humans about some kind of outsized bird of prey crouching on a highway overpass. The plants were judging him, he thought, and rather than growing in fear of him, they were growing out of pity. 

He really couldn’t stand that.

Maybe that was the hardest thing of being able to finally just _be_ in Aziraphale’s presence all the time: the angel ought by rights to be a wreck. He’d only just had the foundations of his faith ripped away, after all. Crowley had been a wreck for, well, time hadn’t really existed at that point, but a very long time. Now, of course, the angel hadn’t really _fallen_ , per se, and so it must have been much less traumatic. But still, surely Aziraphale had been damaged by this? 

And there was no real evidence of it. By all appearances, Aziraphale had accepted the (probable, nothing was particularly official) loss of his rank in the Armies of Heaven with more or less a shrug. He was infuriatingly well-adjusted about it. 

Relative to that, Crowley hadn’t had to suffer at all for this; his experience had been unambiguously something to celebrate. And yet. He was the one who was falling apart over it. 

It was unfair. 

And what _did_ Aziraphale mean by _all kinds_? 

His mobile phone rang. It was from his own landline phone number, which surely had to be Aziraphale, who had more or less a key to his flat now. He answered it with every intention of being grouchy, but instead all he said was, “Angel?”

Aziraphale laughed, that soft warm chuckle he let out sometimes, and said, “Crowley, dear, where are you? I went by your flat but you’re not there.”

“I’m _out_ ,” Crowley said. 

“Well, I gathered that,” Aziraphale said. “Oh, am I meant to guess? Well, you’re clearly on this plane, if you’re answering your phone.” He sounded amused rather than sarcastic, and sometimes that was too much to take as well, the way the angel sometimes thought everything was just a delightful game for him to play at will. 

It was _disgusting_ how well-adjusted that fucking angel was. 

“Of course I’m on this plane,” Crowley said. “What other plane would I manifest to on no notice for no reason?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Aziraphale said, “I’m quite fond of some of them, just for a visit now and then.”

Crowley heaved a deep sigh, and then dissolved himself through the phone, slung himself around a couple of cellphone towers, and came out the other end of the handset, taking form directly next to a rather startled-looking Aziraphale. Crowley still had his mobile in his hand, paradoxically enough, so he jabbed the touchscreen to make it hang up with a theatrical gesture and tossed his head, sneering, “ _What_ , angel?”

Aziraphale’s expression shifted over to delight, which was so bloody infectious Crowley couldn’t keep his sneer in place. With his infuriating delicate precision, Aziraphale hung up the handset and said, “Well, I hope I haven’t interrupted whatever you were doing, I just thought I’d pop by.”

“Finished your book?” Crowley asked, sliding his mobile into his pocket and shaking his wings out to fold them back in to their own little pocket dimension where they usually stayed. 

Aziraphale beamed. “I did,” he said. “Actually it was a series. It was delightful, shall I tell you the good bits?” He slid a look over at Crowley, and added slyly, “Or you could tell me about whatever you were doing with your wings out.”

That was unexpected, and Crowley was caught without a ready sneer to answer with. “Um,” he said, “flying, why do you ask?”

“You answer your mobile when you’re flying? Is that quite safe?” Aziraphale looked scandalized. 

“Well,” Crowley said, defensive, “I wasn’t-- flying at the _moment,_ I was perching just then, I--” and then he caught up with his own defensiveness and said, “What do you mean, is that quite safe, I’m a _demon_ , the laws of gravity don’t apply to me in the slightest if I don’t want them to!”

“Crowley,” Aziraphale said, by all appearances genuinely unhappy, “if you got discorporated, I’m not certain there would be anything I could do about it. I mean-- who is there now, who’d hand out new bodies to _either_ of us?”

“Who’s saying anything about getting discorporated?” Crowley asked, bewildered. “I was lurking on an overpass, if you must know.”

“Oh, is the lurking, kind of, mandatory?” Aziraphale asked. “Like-- for your constitution? I shall have to keep that in mind and make sure you get enough lurking to stay healthy.” 

“For my _constitution_ ,” Crowley sneered. “Really.”

“Well,” Aziraphale said, “I mean-- listen, we’re on our own, we need to take care of one another.”

Crowley stared at him. “I-- that’s quite sweet actually, angel, but you don’t think-- has Heaven been taking care of you, all this time? Because I didn’t think--”

“Well, no,” Aziraphale conceded. “Not as such. Still!”

“Are you feeling at loose ends, a bit, angel?” Crowley asked. “Like there’s no safety harness on this tight rope anymore?” He perked up a little. Maybe Aziraphale wasn’t so obnoxiously well-adjusted as he seemed. 

“A bit,” Aziraphale admitted. “It’s-- well, it’s just, it’s liberating not to worry what they think, you know? But it’s also a little-- well, _you_ know,” he said. 

Crowley grinned. “No,” he said honestly, shaking his head a little. “I truly don’t.”

Aziraphale pressed his lips together. “No, I suppose not,” he said. 

“Don’t worry,” Crowley said grandly, warming to the whole situation a little bit. He slung his arm around Aziraphale’s shoulders, greatly daring-- they had never been in the habit of much physical contact, but they’d been working up to it, and it was pleasant. His body was shockingly warm under Crowley’s arm, even through all the insulating layers of clothing. “I’m here for you, angel. I’m an expert on getting by without any help from Heaven, you know.”

Aziraphale gave him a dark look, but there was a glimmer of amusement in it. “That’s true,” he said, and let Crowley escort him over to the couch. They sat, slightly closer together than was their wont, and Aziraphale leaned in a little, Crowley knew he wasn’t imagining that. Almost like he wanted Crowley to put his arm back around his shoulders. 

Crowley hesitated, at that. That was-- that just seemed too intimate, yet. And it was dizzying, all this time spent trying to offer just enough but not too much, and getting slapped back every time, and suddenly the dynamic was changed but Crowley couldn’t trust it. He’d been slapped back too much to throw himself at Aziraphale any more. 

Maybe he could-- lean in, though. He settled himself with his shoulder touching Aziraphale’s, and the angel smiled brilliantly and relaxed against him as if he did this every day. “Oh, Crowley,” he said softly, sort of tenderly-- why was he being tender? It was dizzying; people weren’t _tender_ with Crowley and he wasn’t sure what to do with it but his reflexive instinct to bristle wasn’t going to help him, he was sure. “You’re right, none of this is really new for you. Oh, I’m glad you’re my friend. You don’t know what a relief it is, not to be alone in a time like this.”

The thing about touching Aziraphale was that he was-- well, he was alive, was the thing, and he had both a corporeal body and a celestial selfhood, and so he not only had a pulse and warm blood, but he also had a burning sort of _presence_ , it was impossible not to feel him profoundly even through their clothing. Crowley was suddenly suffused with a deep urge, from the part of his corporeal form that was most often a snake, to drape his snake form all over Aziraphale and be warmed by him. 

He hadn’t used the snake form much lately: England was rather too chilly and damp for it. He did have a wonderful electric blanket he sometimes indulged himself with, but he hadn’t done that in a while. How much more pleasant, though, to warm himself on flesh, blood, and angelic energy, instead of electrons wiggling in some wires. 

It would probably be rude to do without discussing it first, Crowley thought, and swallowed the urge back down. Oh, but with scales, instead of clothes, it would feel-- 

He pulled himself back to the present, to the lull in conversation, mentally rewound, and said, “Yes, it is-- nice. Not to be. Er. Alone.”

In his peripheral vision, Aziraphale smiled knowingly. “You were thinking of something else, for a moment there.”

“I might have been,” Crowley admitted. 

“Hm,” Aziraphale said, with an air of agreement. Crowley enjoyed that for a moment-- clearly, they were on some kind of harmonic wavelength here, that was good-- but then he paused to try to guess what on earth Aziraphale was agreeing with him about. The angel hadn’t had much experience with Crowley’s snake form, and so wasn’t likely to have been imagining being wrapped in fourteen feet or so of black and red scales. Which meant he was imagining something _else_ , and now assumed that was what Crowley was thinking of too, and--

But he was an angel, surely, angels wouldn’t-- 

It’s not that Crowley didn’t know all about carnal sex, you see. Lust was one of his favorite sins, you could get people to do all sorts of things by figuring out what they wanted and a lot of times, what they wanted was sex, and that one was dead easy to manipulate people with. Crowley’d witnessed all kinds of sex acts, and had participated in a few of them, had instigated even more, and while some of it was fun, if you didn’t mind being alarmingly sticky, most of it was-- well, it was really the best way to hurt someone, to tangle them all up in lust. Sure, you could theoretically have sex for love, but Crowley had basically never witnessed that, and had certainly never experienced it. 

So while he was fairly certain that was one of the things Aziraphale had been implying with the eyebrow-waggle about _all kinds_ of love, he couldn’t manage to reconcile it.

Celestial entities didn’t really experience lust that way, did they? Certainly not angels-- and even demons, Crowley rather thought, were sort of… he hesitated to say _above that sort of thing_ , as there was precious little demons really were above, per se, but-- surely, though, an angel wouldn’t actually want to _fuck_ , angels didn’t fuck. 

Crowley didn’t actually particularly want to fuck. He had done so, and he’d occasionally thought he ought to enjoy it more, but it had genuinely never done much for him-- he could do it, he could even get so far as to have corporeal orgasms, which were-- well, he could understand why people liked them but generally they weren’t worth the hassle and the weird hormonal surges and all the excessively corporeal stuff that it all entailed. 

So surely Aziraphale wasn’t--

But was he?

Oh, no, _was_ he?

“Crowley, you’re thinking too hard,” Aziraphale said fondly. “What ever is the matter?”

“I, um,” Crowley said. 

“Don’t be so nervous,” Aziraphale said, and just like that, turned slightly and put his hand on Crowley’s face, and pulled him in and kissed him, on the _mouth_ , with his _mouth_ , their actual bodies’ mouths, which had actual _saliva_ , it was-- it was-- it--

Aziraphale’s face was smooth, his skin soft and hot, his hand gentle but firm in its grip, and his mouth was-- tender but a little hungry, and he wasted no time, pushing his tongue against-- his _tongue!_ against Crowley’s _tongue_! It was-- it was-- well it wasn’t actually unpleasant, it was actually a little bit exciting, but it was also alarming. He’d fucked before, for work, but he’d never really-- he hadn’t _kissed_ , not like this. 

“It’s all right,” Aziraphale murmured. Close up, he was blurry, a wash of pink and pale gold and clear bluish hazel, a smile more to be felt than seen, and oh, the _heat_ of him, the physical and celestial _heat_ of him, it was dizzying. 

“Is it?” Crowley asked, bewildered. He had-- his mouth tasted like Aziraphale’s mouth, now, and it was-- well it was odd, because Aziraphale’s body’s saliva had a slightly different composition than Crowley’s and so it tasted strange. “I don’t-- that’s--”

Aziraphale pulled away another inch or two, giving him a soft and wondering look. “Crowley,” he said, “have you not-- done this before?”

“I--uhh-- well,” Crowley said, flustered. “Well not with _you_!”

Aziraphale laughed gently. “I mean, I knew that,” he said. “Have you not-- it’s one of my favorite kinds of love, Crowley, the silly physical nonsense humans get up to with their bodies.”

“Isn’t it a _sin_?” Crowley asked, feeling stupid. 

“It can be,” Aziraphale answered, “but much less often than humans think. Like anything sacred, it can be profaned, but if done with good intentions, Crowley, it’s really quite holy.”

“I don’t think I can do _that_ ,” Crowley said. “Oh fuck, are angel body fluids holy?” He put his hand to his mouth, recoiling slightly; was Aziraphale’s saliva going to melt him? But it would have, already, if it were going to. Still.

“No,” Aziraphale said, “don’t be silly, or we could just have wars by spitting on each other.”

“Or, er, something else,” Crowley said. “Still, if you-- what if you and I fucked and it was holy? Wouldn’t I die?”

“No, dear,” Aziraphale said. He took Crowley’s hands in his, and held them. “Nothing of me could hurt any of you.” He looked up into Crowley’s eyes, and it was almost searing, how earnest he was. “I wouldn’t allow it, Crowley.”

There were some snakes, it was said, that hypnotized their prey with their gaze. Crowley was not that kind of snake, and knew enough about other snakes to recognize that it was just rumor, it was more that the prey would be paralyzed with terror. But he thought, in that moment, that maybe there was some truth after all, in some of it. Maybe angels subdued their prey with hypnosis. Whatever it was, it made him close his eyes and lean in and kiss Aziraphale again, even though that was a corny line and shouldn’t have worked. 

And it wasn’t true; Aziraphale had hurt Crowley before and would hurt him again. Not physically, not corporeally, the days of that sort of hurt were probably past now, but those sorts of hurts were trivial anyway. No, he could strike far more dangerous blows in other ways. 

Aziraphale pulled on Crowley’s hands, and tugged him to move over, and by the time Crowley really noticed what was going on, he was sitting in Aziraphale’s lap, astride him, facing him, their bodies pressed together-- it was shockingly intimate, and dizzyingly hot. Aziraphale had his arms around Crowley, one hand on his hip and the other between his shoulder blades where his wings weren’t, pulling him close. 

Crowley had his hands on Aziraphale’s shoulders. He’d quite lost his breath, and his shades were gone somewhere, and he was-- his heart was going like mad, and he was all riled up in ways he wasn’t accustomed to. Aziraphale smiled up at him when he pulled back, with an obnoxious mix of wonder and smugness. 

“Look at you,” Aziraphale said, fervent and breathless. “Beautiful.”

 _Beautiful_ was not the sort of word people often used on demons, and it made Crowley’s skin prickle up. “I don’t,” he said, flustered. “I don’t--”

“Hush, it’s all right, dear,” Aziraphale said. He sat back against the couch, and let his hands run down from Crowley’s waist to his thighs, resting gently on the tops of his thighs and then, still gently, sliding down them and then back up. His touch was light but it burned, somehow, straight through the fabric, and it didn’t hurt but it _burned_. “Take your time. Use your words.”

“I only,” Crowley said, “ah, I don’t-- I don’t know, I--”

He’d genuinely thought that celestial beings didn’t really experience carnal desire the way purely corporeal ones did. But Aziraphale’s desire was unmistakable, from the flush of his cheeks to the sparkle of his eyes, the knowing pressure of his hands even though they were gentle and respectful, the way his body was-- it was arguably not the same gross lust Crowley had encountered previously, but it wasn’t a whole lot different either. And his own reaction-- what was _he_ doing? What _was_ this?

“What is it, dear?” Aziraphale said, encouragingly. “Is there something you want?”

Crowley was so flustered he didn’t realize exactly what it was his body was doing until he’d completed the transformation, but in a moment he was in his snake form, curled in Aziraphale’s lap, parts of him twining right around most of Aziraphale in several loops. He realized what he’d done and hissed in dismayed embarrassment, pressing his face between Aziraphale’s chest and arm and the arm of the couch. 

“Sssshit,” he said, “that wassn’t what--”

“Oh my,” Aziraphale said, laughing, but it wasn’t a cruel laugh. “This is-- oh my, there’s a lot of you.”

“Ssssorry,” Crowley said, mortified. 

He’d actually had sex as a snake, a time or two-- there weren’t a lot of snakes his size around, but he’d met several over the millennia, and actually the most fulfilling sexual experience he’d ever had had been with an enormous female anaconda-type serpent who had been a little bit bullying but very reassuring, overall. She’d been disappointed to discover that they weren’t compatible species to actually reproduce, but it hadn’t stopped her from repeating the experience. He’d gone along with it fairly willingly and had, overall, found it pretty enjoyable, if slightly terrifying.

It was reassuring to remember it. See, sex wasn’t all gross and horrible.

Just sex with _humans_. 

But, Aziraphale wasn’t a human, so. 

Aziraphale was petting him, now, he realized, coming out of his haze of embarrassment enough to catch up. “Aren’t you lovely,” Aziraphale murmured, running his hands along an expanse of Crowley’s side, above the belly scales. “You know, it’s a long time since I saw you in this form. Have you used it a lot?”

“No,” Crowley said, “not really, but it wasss my firssst, and it’sss very comfortable.”

“You seem embarrassed,” Aziraphale said gently, putting his fingers under the edge of the corner of Crowley’s jaw, where it was protruding from his attempt to bury himself behind Aziraphale’s torso. He pried gently, trying to get Crowley to stop trying to burrow.

“I didn’t-- that wasssn’t what I wass planning to do,” Crowley said. “I jusst. I got flusstered.” He stubbornly kept up his burrowing attempts, and in a moment had managed to wriggle his head between Aziraphale’s back and the soft back of the leather sofa. He kept going, winding himself around, and poked his snout out next to Aziraphale’s other elbow.

He had been right; the angel was hot, and in his human form it had burned but as a serpent it was _wonderful_.

“Don’t be embarrassed,” Aziraphale said. “I’m sorry, was I being pushy? I didn’t mean to fluster you. I quite lost my head.”

Crowley darted his tongue out and flickered it before he realized what he was doing. He sucked it back in immediately, and deposited it into the organ on the roof of his mouth where he parsed scents. It was all Aziraphale, it smelled of-- well, Aziraphale’s human body, though there was of course a hint of the burnt-metal tang of space and eternity that celestial beings generally had, far more noticeable to this body’s sense of smell than the dull one Crowley’s human form had come equipped with. He also smelled-- well, somewhat of lust, it was unmistakable, and pointed out his sincerity. 

Aziraphale had moved his elbow and was looking down, Crowley could tell from the shift of his weight, and that meant he’d seen Crowley’s tongue. It took an act of willpower to keep from darting his tongue back out to taste whether Aziraphale’s scent had changed in reaction.

When he’d gathered his courage for a moment, and Aziraphale hadn’t done anything but stroke his scales, over and over, soothingly, Crowley said, “I-- got disstracted earlier becausse I wass thinking about-- how warm you are-- how I wanted to touch you-- like thiss.”

When he was wearing his snake body he tended to have a great deal less invested in the concept of seeming cool. Some of it was because snakes are intrinsically much cooler than humans, and so there’s no need to put oneself out so much, but some of it was also that snakes, being cold-blooded, are generally sensible about wasting effort. His snake form was much more direct and to-the-point about most things, and it probably said something about corporeality affecting one’s intellectual function, but Crowley’d never devoted a great deal of thought to it. (He had discovered that thinking things over in snake form never worked out, because the thoughts mostly just wouldn’t stay in his head. The snake thought about comfort, largely, and so it was good when distressed, but not much help for coming up with solutions or plans.)

(“Wily serpent” was probably just about the farthest thing from the truth in the world.)

“Oh, Crowley,” Aziraphale said, low and soft. “Well, if that’s what you want, of course. Come here.”

It took a little bit of arranging, but Crowley had been in his snake form long enough now to forget about embarrassment. They wound up curled together on the sofa with a nice woolly blanket, and Aziraphale had at some point obtained himself a book and a glass of wine. Crowley basked in the sheer hedonistic pleasure of being entirely wound around Aziraphale’s sturdy, very warm body, bathed in his scent, with Aziraphale’s head propped comfortably against his body like a pillow, and his head lying on the angel’s breast. Aziraphale held his book in one hand and used the other to keep petting Crowley’s brow ridges, only pausing intermittently to pick up his wineglass.

It was very cozy, in a way that Crowley’s flat never was, on a gray afternoon with the rain rattling against the windowpanes, as the afternoon slid away to evening. Crowley snoozed, but never quite fell asleep. Possibly most reassuring was the steady, ongoing vibration of Aziraphale’s body’s coronary circulation, the thump-thump of his heart and the thrumming of his various arteries, all wonderfully palpable to Crowley’s snake body’s sensory organs.

Their bodies weren’t precisely the animals they imitated; Crowley wasn’t a real snake, and Aziraphale wasn’t a real human. But he had a heart, and circulation, and more or less the same organs as a standard human would, and most of the time they worked more or less normally, provided he wasn’t too distracted to maintain them. This meant that, after an interminable and deeply pleasant interlude, Crowley’s attention sharpened as the quality of sound from Aziraphale’s body changed very slightly. 

He refocused his eyes and tilted his head to look up at Aziraphale, who blinked down at his movement. “Yes?”

It took another moment for Crowley to identify the sound. Aziraphale’s stomach, growling. “You’re _hungry_ ,” he said.

“Oh,” Aziraphale said, with a self-conscious laugh, “well, this body is somewhat in the habit of-- well--”

Crowley sighed, gathering resignation and resolve, and in a moment squeezed himself back into his human form. He’d only thought it through from the snake’s perspective, however, and so he wound up in his human form wrapped around Aziraphale with one arm cradling his neck and his head pillowed on his shoulder, far far more intimate than they normally were, and it felt entirely different as a human than it had as a snake. 

“ _Oh_ ,” Aziraphale said, but he sounded pleased, and gently stroked his fingers along the side of Crowley’s face, as he had been doing in his snake form. It had felt different there too, pleasant and uncomplicated. This was… complicated. Crowley didn’t know how he felt about it, but Aziraphale’s fingers lingered along the edge of his cheekbone. “Well. Hello.”

“Uh,” Crowley said, paralyzed with self-consciousness. He’d even manifested himself in pajamas, which was not very on-brand, but was exactly the sort of thing the snake liked. Flannel ones. “Ah. Well. Thiss body’s sssomewhat in the habit of, uh. Napss.” He hadn’t meant to hiss. Embarrassing.

“Sloth and gluttony,” Aziraphale said. “Not the exact hedonism I had been contemplating for this afternoon, but that was really extremely pleasant. Is this reappearance of your human form meant to signal a willingness to go out to dine with me?”

“Yess,” Crowley said, then paused, working his mouth with some distaste as he tried to get his tongue to go back to acting as it should in human form. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Yes.”

  


Later, after a lovely dinner in a little French-style bistro during which Crowley ate far too much, spurred by having spent so long in his snake form, he went back to his flat and sat on his couch and pondered, slightly uncomfortably, what Aziraphale had meant about _hedonism_.

The angel absolutely did want to have sex, corporeal sex. That was what he meant. 

It wasn’t that Crowley _didn’t_ want to, exactly, and specifically with the angel. He’d actually given it thought, earlier, decades ago-- centuries ago, even-- but it had been all part of an elaborate self-deceiving ruse that he was somehow going to seduce the angel and thereby defeat Heaven, and it had mostly gone meandering off into the realm of, well, fantasy-- sexual fantasy, to be honest, which was one of the few data points Crowley’d had (along with the snake fucking) that told him that at least in his case it was not true that celestial beings were entirely disinterested in corporeal sex for its own sake. But the vivid sexual fantasies of tempting the angel (whose coy shows of resistance, in the fantasies, had always been entirely unconvincing, which Crowley guiltily liked best of all) seemed to have very little bearing on what he was actually meant to do with his actual corporeal self when presented with the very physical reality of the angel’s corporeal self, very frankly and practically offering actual sex actually right here and now, with no possible veneer of pretense. There was no longer any excuse of needing to please Upstairs (or Downstairs), and so their actions were entirely unconstrained. And Aziraphale was right here, right now, and very willing.

Surely, this was exactly what Crowley had wanted, for so long. 

And yet his body’s ultra-suave response had been to transform itself into a snake.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey there was accidentally a super jarringly gross gender-essentialist line in here and I fixed it, sincere apologies to anyone that it really grossed-out, I was going for something completely else and just wildly missed! I'm really sorry about that and especially that I couldn't fix it right away when it was pointed out because I am not consistently online nowadays. Deepest apologies!

It was some days before they saw one another. Long enough for Crowley to fret that perhaps he’d fucked it up, their new Arrangement. But no, eventually his mobile rang and it was Aziraphale, blithe and cheery, asking if he wanted to pop round the shop to try some truly excellent cheese the angel had just somehow managed to “score” somehow. Crowley was perpetually perplexed by Aziraphale’s abuse of dialect, and could not pinpoint where on earth he’d have picked up that particular idiom. 

But he obligingly came by, bringing some good crusty bread and a bottle of wine, and in a little box, an extremely elaborate sweet pastry from a patisserie. It was not the sort of thing Crowley would ever have put in his mouth, but Aziraphale was and always had been exceedingly fond of ridiculously sweet things. 

Aziraphale lit up gratifyingly to see him. He more or less always had, it was something he’d so frequently given Crowley-- unabashed, poorly-concealed pleasure at his presence, even in the days when their alliance was still reasonably dubious. “Ah, you brought-- oh, like a _date_ ,” the angel said, and he looked so delighted.

“Well, you said you had cheese,” Crowley said, “and I thought, well, I’m not much for just cheese on its own, but I do like stuff to go with cheese, you know?”

The bookshop was its usual comforting self, dusty and dim and looking for all the world like it had never burned down. Crowley’d had trouble, the first couple of times he’d come back to see it, not reliving the fire, and all the devastating terror of that day. It was funny, how trauma worked sometimes on the human brain, and how he was human enough to feel it. 

To be fair, some of his trauma predated his human body. It was possible that it was more of a sentient thing than a human thing. He absolutely had human-style trauma reactions about the Fall, and he would absolutely rather die than admit it to anyone. 

He’d studied human trauma a bit, under the auspices of learning how to manipulate the little buggers, and it had been, well. Too illuminating, perhaps. 

Aziraphale led him upstairs, to his cozy little flat. Crowley hadn’t been up here very much; most of their meetings had been down in the bookshop’s back room. He’d known the angel had a flat but had only glimpsed it, had never wondered very much. It was very similar in aesthetic to the bookshop, cluttered and homey and full, surprisingly enough, of books. But it was even cozier, with overstuffed padded furniture, and a cluttered little kitchen with a table that had two seats at it and neither of them had any books on them, nor did the table itself, for a wonder. 

Crowley gave it a discerning once-over. He’d been in here before when, exactly? Why… as he contemplated it, he realized it had been sometime in the early decades of the twentieth century. “You’ve remodeled,” he said. Nobody’d had an eat-in kitchen like this in 1919, for certain. 

“Have I?” Aziraphale looked around distractedly. “Not lately.”

“Well,” Crowley said. “Probably not.” And he considered it a moment longer. The back room downstairs would have been perfectly serviceable for eating cheese, there was no reason for Aziraphale to bring him up here for the first time in literally a century. Oh, no: it _was_ a date, or more accurately it was, like, a booty call, and why was he thinking _oh no_ about that, didn’t he want that? He’d brought wine, after all. Oh, but there was certainly a bed up here, and-- well. Well. He pulled himself together and went and slouched in one of the kitchen chairs, pulling off his sunglasses and setting them on the table as Aziraphale dug at the cork in the wine bottle. 

“Oh, I quite like this one,” the angel said happily, looking at the label on the wine bottle. “Didn’t we have this before?”

“We did,” Crowley said. “And you liked it, so I got another.”

Aziraphale got down wine glasses, and Crowley took over pouring the wine while the angel got out the plates and a bread knife and cutting board and such, and revealed that the cheese had been “coming up to temp,” he explained crisply, on the sideboard, and was just about ready. Crowley slumped back comfortably in the chair and listened to Aziraphale’s rambling explanation of how he knew the cheese-monger, and how she’d come by this cheese, and why she’d thought of it especially for him and wanted him to try it, and how he’d told her he had just the friend who’d enjoy it, and she’d be waiting for tasting notes, of course, and he’d been patronizing her shop such a long time, he’d had to stay away a few years while she’d been in the process of taking over from her father so that he’d be able to start fresh without anyone wondering why he never aged, and such.

“I pretend I’m my own son sometimes,” Crowley put in, at that juncture.

“What?” Aziraphale asked.

“With some humans-- I let a few years go by, and then I call them on the phone or write a letter or something, say I’m retiring and handing things over to my son, and then the next time I have to meet them I let them be all astonished at how I look _exactly like my father_ , and then we go on from there. Humans don’t live long enough for me to have to do it twice, generally.” Crowley grinned at the way Aziraphale’s astonished expression went sly as he considered that.

“I’ve done nearly that same thing, I suppose,” he said, “but not so directly. I mean, this book shop, legally, has been inherited four, or five? Six? Times now, by myself from myself. I just-- I don’t think I’d have the nerve to say it straight to someone’s face like that.”

“‘Swhy you use a phone call,” Crowley said, “or a letter or something.” 

Aziraphale brought over the much-vaunted cheese, which was one of those soft kinds, Brie maybe. Crowley wasn’t the hugest fan of cheese, or dairy in general, but he would have eaten glass if it meant accepting an invitation from Aziraphale and discovering he hadn’t fucked it all up by not being willing in bed. Which rather begged the question of why he was nursing such a great knot of dread about the concept. He’d mostly managed to outsource the actual fucking in all his lust-related temptations, but it wasn’t like he hadn’t ever done it at all. It wasn’t necessarily an unpleasant thing. It was rather nice, in some ways, and mostly tolerable in others, and-- 

The thing of it was, he thought, as he put the vaguely goat-smelling cheese into his mouth, that he’d done far less appealing things just for the simple sake of doing them for, or with, the angel. He didn’t even think it was that he _didn’t_ want to go to bed with him. He did, and the idea of _not_ doing it was contributing nearly as much to the tangled knot as the idea of doing it was. 

Aziraphale let out a moderately obscene moan. “Oh, isn’t that delightful?”

Crowley chewed on his mouthful of cheese and bread, meditatively. Aziraphale’s mildly pornographic enjoyment-of-food noises had always pleased Crowley, and sometimes vaguely titillated him, and-- didn’t he want to experience the real thing? If the angel could get that worked up over-- truth be told, it was usually sweets-- what would he do with-- well-- 

Fortunately Aziraphale wasn’t waiting for him to respond, but had gone on to praise the various aspects of the cheese. It wasn’t bad, really; Crowley could understand why someone would really enjoy this, it just wasn’t anything he was going to get excited about. This sort of cheese always tasted a little bit like a barnyard smelled, and surely that was just the ticket for some people. 

Honestly Crowley wasn’t a big eater. He didn’t strictly need it, though generally he did find it pleasant and restorative to eat just as it was to sleep. Sometimes he’d go in his snake form and find a nice fat juicy sewer rat, there was nothing like it to slowly digest in a pleasantly warm place for a day or three. 

He sat there with the cheese melting goat-musk across his tongue and spaced out, just entirely spaced out, remembering the utter bliss of dozing wrapped around Aziraphale in his snake form, and he thought about it so long and so longingly that he had to snap back to attention when Aziraphale waved a hand in front of his face. “What?”

“Where did you go?” the angel asked, torn between amusement and worry. “Is the cheese that good?”

Crowley thought about lying and saying yes, just to move the conversation along, but he hesitated too long. 

“I know you don’t like cheese that much,” Aziraphale said doubtfully. “In fact I rather thought you’d say no when I invited you, I just knew that if I didn’t get someone to help me eat this I’d eat the whole thing, and I wanted at least plausible deniability in it. Are you quite all right?”

“I am,” Crowley said. “I’m just. I was just.” Basking. “Thinking about something.” Yes, basking, that was about right. There was a kind of warmth that came off the angel all the time, and that was exactly it; Crowley had been basking in it all this time. 

“Were you,” Aziraphale said softly, consideringly. And after a moment, he reached over and took Crowley’s hand in his, and held it. His hand was _so_ warm, Crowley nearly couldn’t bear it, and after a moment, he said so. “My dear,” Aziraphale said, “I was just thinking that your hands are always freezing. Isn’t that uncomfortable?”

“No,” Crowley said, which wasn’t quite true; he often did feel cold. “Well-- it is nice to be warm.”

“Is that all you want from me?” Aziraphale asked, a bit teasing. “My body heat?”

Crowley rolled his eyes. “Oh yes,” he said, “I only put up with you all this time in the hopes that eventually you’d hold me.”

“You’re only half-kidding,” Aziraphale said. Crowley refused to blush, but his body didn’t listen. Mercifully, or perhaps mercilessly, Aziraphale went on immediately, “Ah, you’re not really kidding at all,” and used his grip on Crowley’s hand to tug him over and into his lap. 

“I,” Crowley attempted, and Aziraphale pulled him down and kissed him firmly. The angel’s hands stroked over Crowley’s neck, and shoulders, and arms, and back, and waist, and his body radiated heat, and Crowley desperately fought down the urge to change into a serpent. 

“It’s all right,” Aziraphale said. “I’m not here to thwart your wiles anymore.”

“You think these are my wiles?” Crowley asked, a bit frazzled. He was too big for his own skin, on the edge of something, he wasn’t sure what, and it was maddening. 

“You’ve never really used your wiles on me,” Aziraphale said. 

Indignation gave Crowley something to hold onto, and he sputtered with it for a moment. “Why-- yes I have! I tempt you all the _time_ , angel.”

“You do,” Aziraphale said, with a saucy little eyebrow quirk. “But I meant, on purpose, dear.”

Crowley sputtered a bit more, at that, genuinely not knowing how to respond-- what, he was _involuntarily_ seducing the angel? He’d had no deliberate agency in their entire previous relationship? He wasn’t ready to consider that so deeply. “Y-- but-- you, I never-- I-- I _always_ ,” he tried, but none of it would coalesce.

“Don’t worry about it, darling,” Aziraphale said, and kissed him again. 

Crowley wasn’t sure what his body was doing. On the occasions prior to this when he’d had sex, he’d simply expended a bit of effort to manifest some kind of genitals or other, and things had worked out as he’d expected, but on this occasion he was rather too flustered-- he cared too much, perhaps, and wasn’t sure what he expected, and his body was responding by not really knowing what shape to be in, and last time he’d just gone snake-shaped, but this time he was deliberately trying _not_ to go snake-shaped, and it meant he wasn’t really doing anything at all. 

Aziraphale stopped kissing him for a moment, and gave him a soft, concerned look. “I must be doing something wrong,” he said. “Am I coming on too strong, darling? You can be a snake if you want, I didn’t particularly have anything in mind, it’s just that I quite like kissing your human shape, but I don’t have to, at all. I can just hold you, since I know now that’s what you want.”

“N-no,” Crowley said, “it’s, uhhh--” He did, was the thing, he _did_ really want Aziraphale to hold him, but he felt like he ought to want, well-- he wasn’t sure, he didn’t know what he ought to want, he just knew he wanted, _something_ , a lot, and he was terrified to his core that if he didn’t want the right things, the things Aziraphale also wanted, then Aziraphale would go find someone who _did_ want those things, and Crowley wasn’t even sure what those things _were_ , they were _celestial beings_ and not humans at all and so some of those things might well be human things Crowley was decently good at but had never done with any kind of real stakes riding on their outcome, and some of those things were doubtless preferable to other of those things and how was he to know _which_ of them were the ones Aziraphale wanted to do, and if he didn’t want to do them then it would be selfish to insist Aziraphale not find someone else to do them with, if they were things Aziraphale liked, and the thought of that was _so_ unaccountably distressing--

“What do you want, dear?” Aziraphale asked. 

“I don’t know what shape to be in,” Crowley said, which wasn’t really it.

“This shape is fine,” Aziraphale said. “Or the snake, that was pleasant.”

“I don’t,” Crowley said, “I haven’t, this shape’s not--” His default human shape was only approximately human; he’d done a lot of tweaks with it while he was first practicing being human, and the default shape didn’t include any sexual parts at all, really, and he was uncomfortably aware, possibly not a _bad_ sort of uncomfortable, mind, but definitely an uncomfortable sort of awareness, that Aziraphale’s current form absolutely had male human sexual parts because he could feel them, hot and sort of turgid and definitely unmistakable, a warm pressure against his backside. 

It made sense, actually; Aziraphale was a bit of a sensualist, and he liked food and drink and comfort, so it stood to reason he’d like sexual stimulation.

“What’s wrong with this shape?” Aziraphale asked, sitting back a little to run his hands appreciatively along Crowley’s sides, from his hipbones to his ribcage. “I’m terribly fond of it; you’ve had the same one this whole time, haven’t you?”

“More or less,” Crowley said, distracted by trying not to wriggle at how ticklish it was when Aziraphale stroked his ribs like that. The snake form wasn’t ticklish _at all_ but the human one was, and it was one of the reflexes that shape had that Crowley wasn’t entirely happy with. He’d customized most of the rest, but the ticklish thing came up so rarely he’d mostly forgotten to address it. The reflex was all intertwined with things he _did_ like the body to do, so he hadn’t untangled it.

“Really, you can be the snake one, though, if you want,” Aziraphale said. 

“Is that what _you_ want, though?” Crowley asked. “It doesn’t seem like--”

“My dear, I’ve no particular agenda,” Aziraphale said. “I’m enjoying that we’ve progressed into a relationship where we’re no longer pretending we aren’t friends. Being able to touch one another unabashedly is a new and enjoyable development as well.”

“But that’s not _all_ you want,” Crowley said, desperately trying to sound standoffish about it. He could see, quite clearly, that Aziraphale was trying harder than normal to be agreeable, and if he thought Crowley wanted something, he was going to pretend that was what he wanted too, and this was going to be a mess of neither of them wanting to express a strong opinion for fear of finding themselves in disagreement. And since Crowley genuinely only wanted what Aziraphale wanted, that wasn’t going to go well.

“There aren’t really limits on what I want,” the angel said, a little wistfully. “I don’t even know what there is to have, Crowley. There’s so much potential. We could do anything we wanted to, together. You know that better than I do, you’ve such a good imagination.”

This was perhaps the worst possible way this conversation would go. Crowley had spent six millennia now letting the angel manipulate him, and now the angel’s sweet hinting head-tilts and indirect manipulative slightly-pouting glances were being put to use telling Crowley to take the lead in this, which was possibly the only thing Crowley didn’t really feel competent to lead on. 

“Mostly my imagination’s good at horrible things,” Crowley confessed. “Like--” He hesitated, not sure how to say it, but finally blurted out, “I’ve only ever had sex to hurt people with, and I think you want to and I don’t-- I don’t know _how_.”

“To _hurt_ people,” Aziraphale said, alarmed. 

“Humans,” Crowley said. “They get-- their emotions get all out of proportion and they lose all ability to communicate and start expecting one another to be mind-readers, and it’s the easiest thing in the world to wind them up and let them dessstroy each other over lussst because there’s sso much ssense of ssself in it, all their fragile egoss and their vulnerabilitiessss and most of the time I didn’t even have to _fuck_ anybody!” 

He felt small and repulsive and evil to admit it, and really, the thing was, he was a _demon_ , and Aziraphale had this whole idea that he was secretly good and he _wasn’t_ , and he sat back in Aziraphale’s lap and curled into himself a bit and before he knew it, he was a snake again, but a much smaller one this time; the form could be variable in size but he usually only went small when he felt poorly. 

He didn’t think Aziraphale knew that. Still, to be safe, he curled around himself and dropped right off Aziraphale’s lap and under the table. 

“Crowley!” Aziraphale said, alarmed, and slid off the chair too, getting on his hands and knees to look under the table. Crowley was fast, though; the smaller the snake, the faster he was, so he whipped off along the baseboard and down the hall and had twined himself up a lamp to hide in the shade in no time. 

“Goodness, Crowley,” Aziraphale said, coming down the hallway after him. He hadn’t seen where Crowley’d gone, surely. Crowley held still, only flickering his tongue in and out to track the angel by scent. He was in the room now, looking around, and he smelled flustered. “I didn’t mean to-- it’s all right, dear boy, I’m not expecting you to-- blast it, where have you gone? Can’t we talk about this?”

 _No_ , Crowley thought, but of course saying anything would give the game away. 

“Oh dear,” Aziraphale said, and he did sound genuinely distressed. He went back out of the room, and Crowley could feel the vibrations of his footsteps going all the way back to the kitchen. He banged around in there for a few moments, and then came back into the room, and Crowley could smell-- ah, he’d gone and gotten his wineglass and a plate with some cheese on it. He sat down on the couch next to the lamp, and set the wineglass down on the side table under the lamp. 

Crowley couldn’t tell if Aziraphale knew he was there, or not. He stilled the flickering of his tongue and waited, wary. 

“I can tell you haven’t left,” Aziraphale said, sounding a little bit put-out. He sighed, and audibly pulled himself together. “Well, I don’t suppose being peevish about it will help, at all. It’s your turn to complain that I’m going too fast, and it’s only fair, after I strung you along for so very long, that you might not feel you could entirely trust me.”

That wasn’t it at all, and Crowley nearly spoke up to say so until he remembered that he was hiding. Ohh, the angel was _good_ at this, was the thing, he absolutely knew all Crowley’s weak spots. Crowley flicked his tongue in nervous disgruntlement, but kept quiet. 

“I suppose I’d better think of what I can do to prove my good intentions,” Aziraphale went on, and paused to eat some of the cheese. For some reason the smell was more appealing to the snake than it had been to the approximate man-shape. “You know, it’s not that I’m particularly attached to the idea of having human-style sex. It’s something I’ve found fun, but I could take it or leave it.” 

That was a dead-end, there was no way he was going to provoke Crowley into responding about that topic. It was a relief not to feel that he had to comment on the proceedings, or make any decisions or declarations. He settled down, tasting the scent rising from the wineglass. The only thing that would make this nicer would be if the lightbulb were on, giving off warmth; as it was, it wasn’t an ideal basking spot, temperature-wise. But it wasn’t uncomfortable. 

“To be honest, now that I’ve thought of it, though, I can quite easily see how you’d use lust to hurt someone,” Aziraphale said. He was quiet a moment, musing on that. “I know I was present for… well, it’s not that I did it, per se, but I certainly witnessed some people using sex or the promise of it to hurt one another. Especially in the…” He sighed. “The circles I moved in, for a while there. I did what I could, but when for some reason one’s entire society is engaged in telling one that one’s innermost, most heartfelt desires are inherently sinful, it’s a very hard pressure to counteract, even for an angel.” He was quiet a moment, and sank even deeper into the cushions. “I’m afraid there were occasions wherein I caused more harm than help, I’m quite sure of it.”

He sounded miserable. “The act itself-- it can be so pure, so holy, such a heartfelt and all-encompassing act of love, really. And yet. If you fill someone with love and affirmation and then send them out into a society that only sees evil in that, it’s impossible to-- to shelter them from that, to keep the love from being corrupted and turning into something destructive.”

Crowley knew fine well of what Aziraphale was speaking. He’d noted that Aziraphale tended to favor male forms, aesthetically-- both for himself, and to look at. Neither of them had any kind of innate human gender, but Aziraphale expressed that by being absent-mindedly male, which was considered the default in so many of the cultures they’d moved in that the exceptions were hard to even call to mind. Crowley had always thought it was more fun to vary his presentation, and let his whim or reading of the situation dictate what he looked like. Most people read him as male for a surprisingly wide variety of options. He wondered whether, if he manifested female sexual organs, Aziraphale would be interested in them, or how strong the angel’s offhandedly-observed preferences really were for that sort of thing. 

He’d never actually seen Aziraphale fucking a human, or doing anything on that spectrum beyond occasional making-of-eyes and such. But he knew fine well what human culture thought of non-procreative sex, all the complicated feelings it had, and the pressure against anything that wasn’t normative, that threatened the “traditional” order of society that humans hadn’t really been quite so attached to until late in the nineteenth century. 

He’d slept through a bunch of that, but he knew Aziraphale had been struggling on the front lines with it. He knew all about those exclusive clubs, and such. He’d involved himself, a bit, a little later, but he hadn’t needed to do much, the humans had already made a right hash of it. 

“I haven’t had the-- well, I don’t truly have the means to do it anyhow,” Aziraphale said, and he was melancholy now, looking down into his wineglass, slouched a bit. “But I haven’t had the courage, to see how many of those-- of the young men, especially, who I tried to help, how many of them wound up in Hell’s clutches anyhow. It doesn’t-- bear contemplating.”

He sounded bleak, and Crowley sighed internally, then slid down the lamp post and onto the couch, twining himself gently around Aziraphale’s shoulders. His form shifted a little as he did so, and he wound up rather closer in size to his normal serpent self. Aziraphale didn’t flinch or jump; he’d known approximately where Crowley was, then. 

“I didn’t take them,” he whispered. “Anyone you’d touched, I never took. But I can find out, for you, if you want.”

He knew he’d nudged one of them in particular away from some destructive impulse or other; he’d been able to see, in the man’s soul, under all the tarnish of human-inflicted evil and despair, a faint shining outline of where Aziraphale had blessed him, long before. He hadn’t mentioned it, but he’d miracled the man out of some trouble and given him a nudge, refilled his courage with a borrowed bit of blessing, and he didn’t remember much detail but he’d rather set the man up to live a happy enough life going forward. He’d figured it was enough to consider it a freebie, not worth mentioning, and then he’d gone off to incite a barroom brawl to make up for it. 

Aziraphale put up a hand and caressed him, soft along one flank near his neck. “No, dear,” he said, “it’s better not to.” He managed not to look too smug. Crowley didn’t feel too terribly manipulated; it had been quite a good conversational gambit. Just because Aziraphale wasn’t normally subtle in his manipulations didn’t mean he didn’t know how to be. It was worth rewarding with compliance.

It was sort of like the pretense of resistance in Crowley’s guilty sexual fantasies, he realized suddenly, and had a moment about it. 

“If I needed to breathe,” Aziraphale said, “I’d rather be in difficulty.”

Crowley unwound himself hastily from the angel’s neck. “Ssssorry,” he said, “sssorry, I jusst--” 

“I hadn’t realized sex was such a fraught topic for you,” Aziraphale said. “I apologize. And I want to reiterate, I don’t intend to put any pressure on you at all! It’s something I think is fun, no more; if you’re not interested, I’m just as happy not to try it.”

In for a penny, in for a pound, Crowley thought, and twined himself around Aziraphale, maximizing his contact with the angel’s body. “It’sss not that I don’t want to try it,” he said. “But. As I ssssaid, I don’t know how to do it without hurting anybody.”

“Well, we can take it slowly,” Aziraphale said. 

“I jusssst don’t want that to mean that I have to lead,” Crowley said. “Because. I don’t know how.”

“Ah,” Aziraphale said, and drank some of his wine, then set the glass down and stroked Crowley’s scales, meditatively. “Well. To start with, is the snake meant to be… off-limits?”

“What doesss that mean?” Crowley asked, slightly offended by the way Aziraphale said _the snake,_ as if it wasn’t just-- him.

“I mean,” Aziraphale said, “you seem to take on the snake form when you feel threatened or overwhelmed, and it is a way to make sure I don’t touch you in a way you don’t like?”

Mollified, Crowley considered that. “N--,” he said, then paused. Sort of. “No,” he concluded, but not with any certainty. “It’s just. I mean. I’ve only had sssex with other ssnakess in thiss form, sso I don’t know what _you’d_ possssibly do. Anyway you like men, don’t you? You’re not going to be attracted to a ssssnake.” He belatedly realized he’d manifested as a female snake, as well-- it was less obvious than with the human-shaped body, but this body absolutely had female sex organs. They were just the appropriate ones for a snake. Clearly, on some level, his corporeal self was emphatically interested in making this experiment.

“I’m attracted to _you_ , dear,” Aziraphale said. “I don’t much care what shape you are. But you have a point, I’ve no real notion of how one would go about, ah. Making love to an actual serpent, regardless of how magnificent and witty the serpent was.”

Suddenly Crowley had to challenge that, so he transformed himself, back into his approximate human-shape, but at the farthest female extent of the spectrum, with the functional sex organs and everything. (He had a whole spectrum of human shapes that he used, with subtle differences, but most of them didn’t have actual functioning sex organs because he didn’t need them often. He never changed what pronouns he used because he didn’t actually speak English, exactly, it was translated from the proto-language spoken in common by all angelic stock, and that language, belonging as it did to a race of creatures who didn’t reproduce at all, let alone do so sexually, had no real innate notion of gender _or_ sex and so to say that the pronouns didn’t encompass gender was to put it mildly. It wasn’t actually big on the concept of _pronouns_ at all, but that’s another story.)

“Is that ssso,” he said, arranging himself to sit astride Aziraphale’s lap, loose hair hanging down to his shoulders, button-front shirt open to his navel, with nothing underneath, nothing on his lower half but lacy black panties. Like a girl in a magazine. “Sso it doesn’t matter at all what ssshape I am?”

The look Aziraphale gave him was far too heated to be mere delight, eyes gone bright and lips slightly parted. “Not really, no,” he said, and his eyes darted down, taking in Crowley’s apparel, or lack mostly thereof. He paused, then raised one hand from where they’d come to rest on Crowley’s hips, and poked very gently at Crowley’s middle. “A belly button! Why, my dear--”

“If I’m bothering with all the other human stuff,” Crowley said, a little primly, “I might as well have one of those too.”

“Oh,” Aziraphale said, in tones of fervent interest. His eyes flicked up to meet Crowley’s. “ _All_ of the human stuff?”

“All of it,” Crowley said. He’d manifested with sunglasses on, and on an impulse, he pulled them off and put them onto the side table, shaking his hair back coyly from his face.

Aziraphale’s expression was rather the way he looked as a plate of dessert was set on the table in front of him, and Crowley hadn’t expected to be looked at that like that but, wow, did it work for him. “May I--” he said, the hand that had touched Crowley’s belly-button hovering near his torso.

“You can touch whatever you’d like, angel,” Crowley said. “I’ll tell you if it’s too much.” 

He’d expected the angel to go directly for the sex organs, and indeed Aziraphale reached down first, but he was unbuttoning the last buttons on the shirt. Once he’d done that, he slid his hands inside, around Crowley’s waist, just brushing the edge of the low-slung waistband of the underpants, and then he moved his hands upwards in a caress. By coincidence or perhaps cleverness, he avoided any ticklish spots, and instead put his hands on Crowley’s breasts, which in this version of his human form were small but soft. 

“Mm,” Aziraphale said, appreciative. “You’re not wrong that I’ve mostly done this with male humans, but I _am_ extremely fond of breasts. What is it that makes them so pleasant?”

“I’m sure I don’t know,” Crowley said, already breathless. “They’re utterly pointless in my case. I’m not even a mammal! They’re purely decorative.”

“Maybe that’s it,” Aziraphale mused, and he was-- petting, or no, massaging? Or-- well, it was unexpectedly pleasant, and Crowley writhed in his grip a little bit, finding that the sex organs nobody was touching were trying to get themselves involved anyway, urging him to do all sorts of things, unsettling little instinctive movements and a pressing feeling of _need_ , which reminded him of why he so rarely manifested the blessed things. 

“You _would_ like that,” Crowley said, belatedly rediscovering his wit. “Pointless ornamentation. You’re such a bougie angel.”

Aziraphale slid one hand around to Crowley’s back, between his shoulder blades, and pressed his face in between Crowley’s breasts, nuzzling in with a happy little noise. “I’m not particularly tortured or conflicted about my nature, no,” he murmured. “I think it’s honestly a calling, to appreciate things simply for their own sake.” He slid his other hand down, pulling Crowley close by pelvis and ribcage, and his hands were so hot and much bigger than they ought to have been. 

Crowley put his hands in Aziraphale’s hair, caressing his shoulders, the familiar lines of the angel’s corporeal form, so stolid and unchanged all these decades, centuries, millennia. Now that he thought of it, Aziraphale never changed this corporation at all, never lengthened his hair, never used any other form. It struck him to wonder if Aziraphale just always manifested male human sex organs, if he was that unchangeable-- because he definitely had them now, and it was almost all Crowley could think about, beyond the sheer animal pleasure of being touched. No, the angel’s body hadn’t had them when Crowley had inhabited it-- but he wondered if that was a rare exception, for his benefit.

“I should have known,” Crowley said after a while of this, Aziraphale’s mouth on his breasts and the unfocused pressure of grinding himself down into Aziraphale’s lap, and the firm knowing palpations of Aziraphale’s hands, but no actual progress towards anything definite, “that you’d be an interminable tease--”

“In this sort of thing, the journey’s far more important than the destination,” Aziraphale said, but then he surfaced, looking up at Crowley with a flushed but placid expression. “Why, have you some sort of pressing engagement?”

“I think I’m ready,” Crowley said. “I want to fuck.”

“Then that’s what we’ll do,” Aziraphale said, unruffled. “I do intend to take my time, however. I think we’ve waited long enough to warrant savoring it a bit.”

“Fair,” Crowley said breathlessly, but couldn’t help a particularly pointed writhe. Oh, just there-- he could really feel Aziraphale’s sex organ there, hard as anything, straining through both of their clothing, he could just _grind_ \-- 

Aziraphale took the hand that was between his shoulder blades and reached deeper, into the little pocket dimension where Crowley’s wings were, and dug his fingers into the feathers, and Crowley arched his back and gasped so hard it came out as a strangled shout.

Aziraphale didn’t relent, working his-- they weren’t fingers anymore, not really-- parts of his essence, or something, or-- it was just parts of him rubbing into or against or straight through parts of Crowley-- it was beyond comprehension, and Crowley writhed, sobbing for breath. Nobody had ever, ever, ever touched his wings like that, he’d never had any kind of-- he’d never manifested wings and sex organs at the same time, and it was-- he had never-- it was-- 

It was a mixture of the sublime and the carnal. When they’d mingled their essences, in the celestial manner of making love, it had all been very wonderful and very elevated and spiritual and such, indescribable in human words and beyond the comprehension of mortal minds. This was that, but with a thorough grounding in carnality, and it was completely overwhelmingly sensual and ethereal and really fucking _hot_ , all at the same time.

He held helplessly onto Aziraphale’s shoulders and shuddered, sobbing his way through an intense and confused orgasm, and then another, and then another, and finally Aziraphale let go and Crowley collapsed in a sobbing, shaking heap on his shoulder, making incoherent non-word noises with his corporeal mouth. His wings manifested in his confusion, and fluttered around them in disjointed reflexive twitches. 

“There, there, dear,” Aziraphale said, and he only partly managed not to sound smug. 

“I d-d-didn’t know th-th--” Crowley attempted, his mouth stuttering like a glitching machine. He tried again, raising his head shakily. “How did-- how’d you know they-- I didn’t know that-- what _was_ that?” His hands were weak and his thighs were twitching and the sex organs hadn’t even been _involved_ but they were, somehow, and he was a dripping wreck. 

Aziraphale kissed him, sweet and gentle and promisingly eager. “I’ve picked up a few things,” he said, cradling Crowley’s jaw in one hand fondly, holding him up so he didn’t flop over again. “When you’re using love to lift people up you learn better tricks than when you’re only using it to hurt people.”

“Holy _fuck_ ,” Crowley said weakly. 

“That is my aesthetic, yes,” Aziraphale said, infuriatingly smug but also so sweet Crowley couldn’t be annoyed. He was also too scattered to take umbrage about the concept of holiness, though there was a small wary part of him deep down in his center, where he used to be filled with Grace, that was waiting for something about this to inevitably burn him.

He’d swapped entire bodies with the angel, not that long ago, so if there was anything physical that would burn him he’d already know it. And he’d done enough blessings himself over the centuries to know that there was nothing in that to burn him either. But there was still a little cringing part of him that was braced for it, for his corrupted nature to be somehow fundamentally unable to bear up under something celestial at some point in this process. However, at the moment, that part was also completely blasted into submission by sensation, so he had a bit of peace to simply shudder in anticipation and not bother at all with dread.

“My dear, you’ve melted,” Aziraphale said. “Are you all right?”

Crowley recovered enough coordination to seize the angel’s face between both of his hands and kiss him deep and hard. The only reason he surfaced was that one of his wings knocked over the lamp and startled them both. 

“Oh dear,” Aziraphale said. “You know, dear-- I do have a bedroom, and there’s less breakable furniture in there. Should we adjourn?”

Crowley shakily miracled the lamp back whole and upright, and then set about trying to find his feet while he put his wings away. He noticed, as he put weight on his feet, that they had snake scales: he’d been so distracted manifesting genitals that he’d paid no attention to that detail, so he quickly rectified that, and then tried to stand up and found his knees shaky. Aziraphale stood up, holding him by the elbow and waist. 

The angel was fully clothed, and it felt-- somewhat dirty, for Crowley to be nearly nude and wrecked as he was, but the angel’s composure was belied by the way his erection distorted the front of his trousers.

“You don’t even _sleep_ , angel,” Crowley said, as they went through a doorway he didn’t think had been there before, into a cozy little room with a sunshiny window seat with bookshelves, and across from it, a sturdy and unusually wide bed. “Why have you got a bed, let alone a bedroom?” Crowley went over to it, narrowing his eyes to inspect it: he had a very distinct suspicion Aziraphale had only bothered putting it in here at all for the express purpose of bedding Crowley.

Which was kind of nice, to think of, honestly. 

The sheets weren’t even tartan, for a wonder; they were plain pale blue, and the bed was made and neatly turned back, the coverlet a tasteful white-on-white with candlewick embroidery. It was not particularly to Aziraphale’s tastes, in that it was understated and tasteful, and Crowley wondered what book Aziraphale had lifted the description from. 

“One needs a bedroom, sometimes,” Aziraphale said innocently.

“This is all very classy,” he said, his attempt at a nonchalant drawl rather spoiled by his all-consuming impatience to get absolutely railed on these lovely plain sheets. He sauntered over to the bed, and turned around to look at Aziraphale. “Are you going to leave your clothes on for the whole thing?”

“I’m still deciding,” Aziraphale said. 

Crowley shrugged his shirt off his shoulders, and stood there naked except for the black lace panties, hands on his hips. “I know what my vote’s for,” he said. 

“We have so much time,” Aziraphale said. “Well, I suppose we can play with that another time.” And with that, he waved a hand and was naked, entirely naked. 

Crowley had seen Aziraphale naked before, he rather thought, surely? but this was a much different context, and that was a seriously prodigous erection. “Holy fuck,” he said again. “Do you carry that thing around all the time?”

“It doesn’t look like this all the time,” Aziraphale said primly. “Now, dear, let’s pick up where we left off.” 

“I’m serious, that thing’s massive,” Crowley said, but let Aziraphale gently press him down onto the large and comfortable bed.

“Are you worried you can’t take it?” Aziraphale asked, all false concern. “I could make it smaller, I suppose, it’s just-- no one has ever objected before.”

It was transparent, but Crowley did him the favor of rising to the bait. “Of course I can _handle_ it, angel,” he said, rolling his eyes. “I was just worried about the strain of it on you all this time. Or were you saying you just made it bigger for me?”

“I could make it bigger for you,” Aziraphale said. “Gluttony’s a sin but, I mean, that’s your specialty, and on my end it would just be generosity--”

“Stop teasing,” Crowley said, with a desperate little shiver; Aziraphale had the underpants off him now and was delicately but firmly moving his fingers, first against and then into Crowley’s body. 

“Oh, dearest, you _are_ impatient,” Aziraphale said. The way he was moving, he clearly had experience with female human sex organs; he’d easily found where and how to best apply internal pressure, and Crowley lost his capacity for speech and made encouraging noises instead for a pleasant little while. “Oh, my darling,” Aziraphale murmured encouragingly, stroking deftly into him with one hand, and leaning over him and kissing and kissing him until he couldn’t breathe. 

(Breathing wasn’t necessary, but for some reason, at the moment, it _was_. Sex apparently demanded him to be more incorporated than normal, to take advantage of all the reflexes and hormones and things, and that meant he had to breathe, and it was challenging.)

“Azir-- aphale--” Crowley gasped, thinking that perhaps he was going to discorporate after all-- he felt like he was going to fly apart, and his wings kept trying to come out. He’d fucked as a human before and it hadn’t been like this _at all_. It wasn’t just what Aziraphale was doing, it was who he was-- _what_ he was. 

“Do you want me, dear?” the angel asked, and he seemed infuriatingly composed, but Crowley had just enough awareness to really look at him, and see how pink he was, how avidly his eyes glittered. He was nowhere near as in-control as he seemed. 

“Fuck,” Crowley said, summoning his body back to his control. He rolled them both over, pushing Aziraphale flat down onto his back. 

Aziraphale lay looking up at him bright-eyed, lips parted, breathing hard-- he was glorious, radiant with it, and Crowley was seized with a deep, consuming need to take him apart as he himself was being taken apart. 

He knelt up and fitted that absurd erection into the intended place, which was, well, it was extremely well-lubricated quite on its own, to the point of impatience-- and then let himself sink down onto it, slowly; he lost control of his thigh muscles about halfway through, and Aziraphale caught him by the hips and held him steady, murmuring reassuring things that sounded a lot more collected than the angel really looked. 

Aziraphale was a searing-hot intrusion into Crowley’s body, an enormous impalement, excessive-- and yet sublime, and Crowley took shallow breaths and threw his head back and _took_ him, all of him, the rest of the way, to the hilt-- too much, he felt like there was no room for his lungs-- impossible, utterly unrelated to any physical situation, but metaphorically-- celestially maybe-- he was completely filled, pinned like a butterfly on a collection board, and Aziraphale’s hands on his hips seared too, like a brand, he was being incinerated, blown apart, destroyed-- 

He sucked in a breath and collapsed forward and looked down, and Aziraphale was staring up at him in wide-eyed wonder. “My love,” Aziraphale said, something almost helpless in it, like he hadn’t any control over his voice, like he was speaking from the heart and his capacity to filter himself was gone. 

“Fuck,” Crowley hissed, “fuck me, fuck--” 

Aziraphale moved, and Crowley made a truly feral noise and held on, tilting his hips to ride along with the movements, and that-- oh wow-- _that_ was sublime, that was going to blow him apart. 

He tried to keep doing it, but his movements went ragged and convulsive right away, and then he was just hanging on for dear life, twitching and bucking as he came long and hard, clenching against Aziraphale’s cock. He was making all kinds of noises he had no control over, and there was no dignity, there was no preservation of himself, all he could do was hang on. 

At some point he could tell Aziraphale was coming too, stuttering gasps and stuttering hips and bruising force from his hands on the outsides of Crowley’s thighs, holding him tight to get deeper in him, desperate little whimpers and a gorgeous impression of shocked-wide eyes as it swept through him. 

They shivered into a throbbing kind of stillness together, tangled up, bodies still joined, and stayed like that a little while, catching their breath. Crowley let his head fall against Aziraphale’s shoulder, sinking down against him. He felt-- weirdly hollowed-out, and vulnerable, and overemotional in all the ways that were human hormones at their best and worst, as intoxicating as any ingested chemical. But Aziraphale was solid and sturdy and smelled of himself, and held him without speaking, stroking one hand gently up and down the middle of his back.

“That went well,” Aziraphale said eventually, far too chipper, and Crowley smacked his shoulder. 

“What is wrong with you,” he said. His throat was hoarse from all the noises he’d been making.

Aziraphale laughed. “Nobody got hurt,” he said. “Or did they?”

“I can’t feel my legs, angel,” Crowley said. 

“Oh you’re fine,” Aziraphale said.

“That’s all well for _you_ to say,” Crowley said. “I think your cock broke my spine.”

Aziraphale actually gave him a concerned look, at that, and Crowley laughed at him. “Your face!” he said.

“Come off it,” Aziraphale said good-naturedly. “You loved every inch of that.”

“I did,” Crowley admitted. “You can get it out of me now, though. I’m all set, angel.”

Aziraphale rolled his eyes, and then rolled away a little bit, taking far more care than he truly had to-- the thing had diminished considerably in size, so it came out a great deal more easily than it had gone in. It still made Crowley shiver. The angel made a face. “That’s appallingly sticky. Sorry, dear boy.”

“Ha,” Crowley said; he was secretly, guiltily glad to discover he was absolutely not the only awkward one in this relationship. He knew he was far from as suave as he thought he was but even he knew better than to call someone _dear boy_ immediately after sex. “Next time it’s your turn to get the mess.”

Aziraphale reached over and took his face and with appalling tenderness, kissed him. “Anything you want, darling,” he said, with deep sincerity. And then he smiled. “I can’t wait.”

Crowley had no choice then, he had to kiss him. And then he contemplated whether to miracle away the mess, or just change his whole form. He went for the latter, aiming for his default shape, but he overshot and wound up in the all-the-way male form, with the relevant sex organs. (That happened sometimes: if he was thinking about sex he wound up in a form with sexual parts. It wasn’t always a particularly conscious effort.)

“Oh,” Aziraphale said. “Are we doing it now?”

“Uh,” Crowley said. He hadn’t really intended to-- but, well. The main-- bit there was clearly in something of an aroused state.

“This is perhaps the best day of my life,” Aziraphale said, and kissed him, and Crowley’d assumed he’d been sated earlier, but well. His notions of how sex worked had all been predicated on humans. And Aziraphale, of course, was not. 

“Well,” Crowley said. “Yes, but only if you show me how to do that thing with the wings.”

“Absolutely,” Aziraphale said, and sat up, manifesting his wings. “Now, do you want me with a cock, or-- just tell me, I can do any of them.”

“Are you this insatiable with humans?” Crowley wondered.

“No,” Aziraphale said, wings drooping briefly. His cock did not droop, but had rather resumed its earlier state. But then he perked up. “But you’re not one, so why shouldn’t I be?”

“Fair,” Crowley said. “No, keep it, I’m growing fond of it.”

“Are you really,” Aziraphale said, delighted. 

They decided to experiment, and Crowley fucked Aziraphale with both of their wings out, which was a little tricky but somewhat entertaining, and meant they could take advantage of the relative lack of clutter in the bedroom to really spread out. It seemed a little silly, to do such a human thing while not entirely human in form, but then Aziraphale reached out and dug his fingers in through the coverts on Crowley’s left wing, and really hung on, and it added a certain _frisson_ to the whole proceedings that built up to them half-melded celestially while they were joined physically-- it quite sent Crowley wildly over the edge, and then he sucked Aziraphale’s cock and Aziraphale transferred the grip to his hair, hanging onto it quite firmly, and that sent _both_ of them pretty well off the edge, and both of them wound up fairly messy, on the corporal side of things. 

Crowley stayed on his knees beside the bed, resting his head on the edge of the mattress, while Aziraphale, wings put away, sprawled out on his back, catching his breath. “Well now, _that_ was a thing,” Crowley said eventually. 

“It certainly was,” Aziraphale said, not stirring.

Crowley slid himself back into his more neutral form, and used a trailing edge of the sheets to clean the mess off his face instead of a miracle. Now was possibly the time to discover whether Aziraphale had a shower. Or-- He sat up, put on an obnoxiously chipper aspect, and said, “What next, old chap?”

Aziraphale moved his arm from where it was flung over his eyes. “What do you mean, what next?”

“Well,” Crowley said, “I mean, we’re insatiable, right?”

Aziraphale groaned. “No,” he said, “you win. Come here.”

Crowley looked suspiciously at him. “What for?”

Aziraphale lifted his head again and gave Crowley a look. “For a postcoital cuddle,” he said. “Didn’t this all start because you wanted me to hold you? Well, I want to hold you.”

“A _what_ ,” Crowley said. 

“Oh for goodness’ sake,” Aziraphale said fondly, and sat up to take Crowley by the arm and pull him into the bed. “I suppose if you never did this for fun you never did this part either. It’s my favorite, Crowley, when you’re all shagged-out and you just lie there together and catch up. It’s really the only time I’ve ever done much napping.”

That was enough to sell it to Crowley. He climbed into the bed, and said, “Can I be a snake?”

“Of course, darling,” Aziraphale said.

Crowley sighed in relief and slid into his snake form, twining himself around Aziraphale, who pulled up the blankets and made a nice cradle of his shoulder for Crowley’s head. 

Crowley sank against him, basking in his warmth, and slid into what was most likely the most blissful sleep of his entire life. 

So far.

**Author's Note:**

> The whole time I was writing this I was envisioning it being about six thousand words long and I still think it is, there's just some... extradimensional something going on in there. Sorry? Really, I swear, six thousand words, eight thousand tops. Let me know if you figure out where the glitch is that's making it register as more.


End file.
